


Hollow

by squireofgeekdom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, POV Second Person, The power of friendship, Transformers: Lost Light 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 17:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13886118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squireofgeekdom/pseuds/squireofgeekdom
Summary: "How do you feel?""Hollow."Ratchet, from the Dead End to the present.





	Hollow

**Author's Note:**

> Just some thoughts that have been kicking around in my brain since LL13, because I'm Sad About Ratchet

**** They call you a lot of things, for going down to the Dead End. Idealistic or naive. Brave or foolish. Charitable or wasteful. Optimistic or callow. 

You don’t feel like any of those things.

You certainly don’t feel idealistic - that’s for other people. For Orion, an idealistic bot if ever there was one, who still - still sometimes manages to make you feel like you’re doing something, like you’re part of something - powerful. That you could be a part of something different. Orion never acts like you’re naive or brave or charitable or optimistic or any of the other things the idiots say. He knows well enough to look at you by what you do, and let that speak for itself, even as he reads and dreams and keeps looking up with those bright eyes, searching for something better. 

Maybe you were naive, once, or callow. You certainly aren’t now. Maybe they thought you were someone who would show up here for a week, a month, maybe even a year, until everything you couldn’t fix wore you down and broke your rose colored glasses, and you’d crawl back to wall yourself in the safe hospitals of Iacon and reminisce about how much better it was here. But you’ve never been prone to magical thinking; and you are very, very bad at giving up. 

You’re sure as hell not brave. That’s another one for Orion, or Roller, or any other bot that does work that takes them into  _ real  _ danger, not just some addled patient with a gun in their leg or a pissed off dealer with a chainsaw. You’re not  _ brave _ for ‘going down  _ there’ _ , like they simper at you in hushed tones. You’re just too damn stubborn. 

Foolish you’d allow - you almost prefer it - if it wasn’t that it was always spouted by the most colossal fucking  _ idiots  _ you knew - and always just as you passed; at least the simpering morons had the decency to spew their drivel to your face. You’re not going to give the words of those dull-witted cretins the processor space of your consideration. 

If you consider it, the ones who call you charitable might make you boil the most. You’re not  _ charitable.  _ You’re doing the damn thing you’re  _ good  _ at - you were fucking  _ made  _ for it. You’re not doing  _ charity work,  _ you’re being a damn  _ medic, _ just like every other bot in the better parts of this city gets - just like every bot would get if Orion had his way. Whatever blasted mix of dissatisfaction and guilt and stubbornness and  _ rage  _ drags you down here every day, there isn’t an ounce of it that’s charitable. It sure as hell doesn’t make you feel  _ better  _ about yourself, it just - keeps you  _ yourself.  _

Wasteful is one of Pharma’s favorites, you’re ‘wasting your talents’ he’ll say, like tightening a senator’s elbow screws or checking a priest’s fuel pump for the third time that week is the best use of your talents. He’ll recite off statistics about recovery rates and life expectancy and whatever damned crap he’d dredged up this time about the people ‘down there’. Pharma seems to think you should spend more of your time researching, like you don’t already know damn well how to fix practically every problem that’s killing the bots on this planet, most of them with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your back, if they’d just let you - 

Optimistic? Yeah, that’ll make you laugh.  

So no. You don’t feel like any of the things they call you. 

You feel like you are throwing pebbles against the tide to no purpose other than the fact that to do less would break you, would leave you a shell of yourself. 

You know it’s selfish, just as well as you know that you are unimaginably fortunate, that your angst is a luxury.

This is the least you can do.

You know it as well as you ever do each time one of them leaves your doors. Each time you send them off. And you do send them off, because what else is there for you to do? 

(You know what else. You know it would be unsustainable, rationally, even if the need to do  _ more _ makes your fuel pump twist.)

The third, fourth, fifth timers, the regulars, though few and far between  - you tried to find things to say, at first. Now you just try to give them  _ something  _ for regular maintenance, tell them to come back when they need it  - even though saying that kills you, when you can’t promise you’ll be there. 

The new ones?

You try to send them to the job offices, with earnestness that is less and less genuine as you see more and more of them come through your doors. Some of them you don’t see again, and you hope that means they were placed in a job that took them far away from here. You hope it worked. 

You know there isn’t much hope. Even if Pharma didn’t read you the damn stats, you see it in the eyes of any of them that have been here long enough. 

What else can you say? Momentary hope has to be better than coldly reciting Pharma’s statistics.

And it has to work sometime. Somewhere, somehow, it has to work out right. You still believe that, somehow, because you have to, and maybe that does make you naive or optimistic or whatever else they say about you. You’d say it makes you desperate.

_ Please let it work for this one. Please. _

_ \--- _

The world doesn’t care much about your desperation. 

It certainly doesn’t bother to remember it.

What do they remember? That you’re the only autobot to have saved the life of every Prime since Nominus. 

Like the time you spent treating Nominus, and Zeta, and every one of the damn props that surrounded them is something you’re proud of. Like it isn’t regret that’s tied up around those memories.

No, not regret. You cannot regret lives saved. But still - it is bitterness that it’s wrapped up in. Guilt, more than that, for the time you were in the city and not at the clinic. 

People died because you weren’t there. 

That’s not irrational guilt, or whatever Rung thinks. It’s perfectly rational. You know because you found their bodies, when you got back from treating whatever Senator had needed his knee joints loosened. You found them, each time, on the steps of the clinic, or propped against the wall. Grey.

You brought them in, all of them. Autopsied them, when there weren’t living bots around to repair. It was necessary, to determine what parts might be suitable for donation. Rational. 

That’s why you know that all of them, almost to a one, died because of you. Because you weren’t there to perform the treatment you could have done - done with your eyes closed, with one hand tied behind your back. 

Rung tells you to focus on the ones you saved, and you do. You focus on Drift, somewhere, out there, alone. Waiting. 

There are a million things he could be doing out there, in the wider universe. Rationally, you can’t even be sure that he’s waiting. You know that. But you can’t imagine any of the millions of things he could be doing, not really - your mind keeps coming back to this one image: Drift - not in the frame you know, but the one he had back the first time you met him, back in Dead End - that Drift, on the steps of the clinic. 

Grey. 

If Drift - 

You don’t want that to happen.

\---

It doesn’t happen. You don’t let it. 

“I don’t -” Drift starts, leaning up against the wall of the shuttle in the dark. His colors are washed out, but it’s just the shadows, nothing more. He laughs a little, but it sounds hollow and distant, “I still can’t believe you did this for me.” He reaches out to the dashboard, to the little miniature of himself standing there, and taps it on the forehead. There’s a little wry quirk of his mouth that looks more like hurt. “It still doesn’t feel like -  like I’m worth doing all this for.” 

“Little late to tell me that now,” You snort. Drift just looks at you, and you sigh. “C’mon, kid. You know damn well you didn’t deserve to be kicked off the ship.”

“And  _ you  _ know I volunteered.” Drift says, voice edging towards danger that you ignore. 

“And you  _ shouldn’t _ have. And Rodimus  _ should  _ have said  _ no _ , and should have  _ fucking  _ known better than to just  _ leave  _ you out here -” You growl.

Drift goes quiet, and withdraws his hand from the dash. You realize, inconveniently after-the-fact, that maybe you shouldn’t have ignored that danger.

“Drift,” You start, after a pause, “What’s this really about?”

Drift tilts his head back until it  _ clangs  _ softly against the hull of the shuttle. “C’mon, Ratchet. You know what - who I’ve been. Most of the ship never trusted me, and I can’t blame them. I’ve -”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud -”

“No,” Drift says. “You don’t get to tell me that I don’t get to feel  _ guilty,  _ Ratchet, not after what I’ve done. You said it yourself, I’ve been trying to find ab -”

“Kid, we  _ all  _ feel damn  _ guilty,  _ we don’t all leap at every damn chance of falling on a sword -” Drift snorts. “- and run off  _ alone  _ on some self destructive galaxy-spanning nonsense -  _ whatever  _ this was.” You bite your lip before you speak again. “You think you’re the only one who feels like you don’t deserve this?  _ You’re  _ the only damn person on this shuttle that ever screwed up?”

Drift frowns. “What are you  _ talking _ about?” 

“You think people aren’t dead because of me?” 

“I know you killed people, it was - that was what it was, for all of us, Autobots and - but you were a medic, it isn’t anything -” He shakes his head. “You weren’t - you weren’t a  _ feared killer. _ ” Drift smiles up at you. “Don’t get me wrong, w-- the Decepticons heard of you. But you weren’t -”

“I don’t mean -” You shake your head. “You’re right. My toll wasn’t - it wasn’t on the battlefield.” You huff, and roll your head. “When you did your job, people died. When I failed  _ my  _ job, people died.” You say, dry. 

Drift stares at you. 

“People are dead because of me.” You say, and you see grey bodies on a battlefield. Grey bodies on a doorstep. “People I failed.”

“It’s different.” Drift says, shaking his head. “You didn’t kill them.”

“Doesn’t change how dead they are.” You spit out. 

“You can’t - you can’t think like that. You might as well hold yourself responsible for everyone  _ I  _ killed, because you weren’t there to save them.”

You don’t say anything. Drift looks at you. 

“Ratchet -” He sighs. “Oh, Ratchet.”

“What - don’t look at me like - like I’m some sort of sad sack.”  You look at the floor. “I’m just trying to make a point that you’re not the only one who’s ever screwed up.” You growl at Drift. “So you don’t have to keep acting like you’ve got to fucking - wander around with the whole ‘penitent monk’ trip you’ve got going on and keep throwing yourself on every damn grenade you can.” You sigh, and grind your feet into the floor of the shuttle. “Don’t make a big fucking deal about it.” You say, staring at the wall. 

Drift smiles at you, a little sad. “I’ll stop jumping on grenades when you do.”

“Yeah, kid? The difference is, when I do it, I’m not being a  _ fucking idiot. _ ”

“You still keep saving me, though. An ‘idiot’.” Drift says, smiling and putting a hand on your shoulder.

“Can’t rule out saving idiots, I’d lose most of my patients.” You say dryly, and Drift chuckles. You look over at him. “I guess I’m doing something right, at least.”

“Don’t ever doubt it.” He says, smiling a little.

You think for a moment, “Then,” you start, words forming around a wry twist in your mouth.  “you’re worth saving?”

Drift lets out a surprised huff of laughter and leans back. “You play dirty pool.”

You snort. “Don’t act surprised.”

Drift just smiles. 

\---

And you do save him. You get him home.

Granted, you both almost die pretty much immediately afterwards, but then you don’t. 

Skids does. The first thing you do when you get back is fail someone else.

(Of course it is.)

And then - 

Roller comes walking through a door -

\- and for a second you’re four million years younger, the same bot who couldn’t say goodbye properly -

\- with a second chance. 

The thing is, it’s hard enough to explain the past thirty-seven hours, much less the past four-million years. 

You try anyway.

“Ratchet?” Roller asks, finally, when you come to a slow, awkward close, “How - how are  _ you  _ doing?”

You look at the floor. Unfurling it all in words, even the bare bones, what you’ve seen, what you’ve heard, over four million years of war - 

It makes you feel the weight of all those years.

You feel old, old in a way that’s heavier than the way you feel old on the Lost Light, surrounded by bots who seem to have endless stores of energy. 

And Roller still looks the same as when you last saw him.

“... I never said goodbye, properly.” You force the words out of your throat.

“Hey, chin up, doc.” Roller says, “I’m back now.” He continues, smiling, “C’mon, you may look different, but you’re still the same old Ratchet.”

You huff. “It’s been a while” You tell him, but you don’t sound quite as glib as you’d like.

“Hey,” Roller reaches out and puts a hand on your shoulder, tugs you towards him, and you grumble as you let him, trying not to give away the fact that it’s the most grounded you’ve felt in - well. A while. “I know I’ve been gone too long, and I know not everything is going to be the same. But even though I haven’t been back long, I know you’ve got the same spark,” he reaches out his other hand and pokes you, “And you’re still my friend. That’s good enough for me.”

“Listen to you, talking like you’re the brains of the operation,” You say, and elbow him in the side. He snorts, and you point a finger at him. “And don’t think just because it’s been a while I’m going to let you get away with your old shit. The circuit speeders in your energon boxes? Yeah, I know about that, don’t try and look innocent, that shit cuts out right  _ now.  _ I’m  _ old,  _ I’m not  _ senile. _ ”

Roller’s just  _ laughing  _ at you, that bastard. “See,” He says, “Still the same old Ratchet.” 

\---

Here’s the thing: your plan ended after ‘Find Drift, bring him back to the Lost Light’.

Which was, at least, a decent addendum on the old plan, ‘Get on the Lost Light, find a successor, retire?’

Here’s the problem with finding a successor: If you don’t, you haven’t done enough, you’ve abandoned the Autobots without a chief medical officer. If you do -

You’ve never really planned for retirement. You know damn well you’ll never do enough, which suits you just fine because what you do is all you’ve ever been good at anyway.

So of course you couldn’t hand over the reins without heading out on one last house call.

But now?

Drift is back with the Lost Light crew. Your successor is - well, back on Earth from what the crew has told you, but the Lost Light still has a medic, certainly one with a better bedside manner than you have these days. 

You’ve done your job. Really, who the hell would miss you?

Of course you’re a dead man walking. 

(Of course you feel hollow.) 

_ Past your prime, past your time, old man. _

Your hands are shaking, and you can only hope Drift doesn’t notice. You should have known that you only bought yourself a short reprieve by taking Pharma’s hands, but you - no, it had been too much to hope. You’re not supposed to be naive. 

They’ve gotten you this far, at least, before you become utterly useless. But now - it’s the same weakness, again, and maybe it should scare you less, because you’ve been through it before, but it’s shaking your spark casing just the same too, even as you try to spot-weld your hands, patching and tightening, trying to fix this. 

You don’t see a reprieve coming now.

Is this it? Is this your time?

_ Is this enough?  _ You think, looking at Drift.  _ Have I done enough? _

You haven’t. You never will. You think, if nothing else, Drift would understand that.

\---

“Drift… Velocity… anyone…”

Drift grabs you, and you can feel his arm, his hand, real and solid and grounding, even as you’re still halfway through the hull of the ship. You spit curses and Drift tightens his grip.

“Rodimus! Magnus - Roller!” Drift shouts, and suddenly there’s another set of hands on your back, Rodimus bracing Drift’s shoulder, but you barely have a chance to notice before you feel yourself lifted back up through the floor - your feet don’t have the chance to touch the plating before you’re lifted into the air - Roller’s picked you up, you and Rodimus and Drift, and Magnus reaches across with one arm to help brace Roller, and there’s another set of hands bracing you from below.

“C’mon, doc!” It’s  _ Swerve.  _

“Ratch?” Roller asks.

“I -”

“Ratchet!” You hear Velocity yell, but out of the corner of your eye you can see she’s still kneeling over her patient - good. Even if you’re going to fall from obsolescence into oblivion, she’ll be there to do your job. 

“We’ve got him!” Roller shouts back. “Ratch, you okay?”

“Come on, come on, come on,” Drift’s muttering, fingers tight around your hands, pressing into the metal almost hard enough to dent. 

“Hang on, Ratchet-” Rodimus grits out, muffled from where he’s pressed between Drift’s shoulder and Roller’s arm. “ -’re not letting you go -”

What the hell are they holding on to?

Why -?

You can feel Roller’s arms shake with the weight of the three of you, but he doesn’t let go. Rodimus grits his teeth, determination scriven across his face,  and there’s something fierce and fearful in Drift’s optics when he looks at you, like - 

Ah, dammit. You don’t want to make the kid look like that.

You want - 

You want to hear Roller laugh, and catch tiny smiles on Ultra Magnus’s face, and be the only customer in Swerve’s bar, and keep watching Velocity light up when she talks to patients, and argue with Rodimus after he gets banged up in another ridiculous game, and see all of Drift’s different smiles, even the annoying ones, and - 

And damn your hands and your guilt and your failure and your obsolescence, and damn your hollowness too, this isn’t enough, you want - 

You  _ want - ! _

“Ratchet,” Magnus grits out, his head now very close as he leans down from the closing ceiling, “Are you -?”

“Look - !” You can’t see Brainstorm, but you can recognize his voice, as well as the buzz of  _ whatever  _ device he’s got with him. 

You look down and there’s - there’s white and red on your forearms, spreading out from where Drift’s hands are clasped around yours, and below, on your sides, from where Roller’s arms are pressed against you, and where Rodimus is hanging on. Something brightens at the edge of your vision, and you can just glimpse that it’s spreading from where Magnus’s hand is braced up against your shoulder. You can’t see far enough down to tell, but you’d guess the color is spreading up from Swerve’s grip at your feet, too.

Drift looks up at you, bright eyed. 

“If you say my aura’s back, I’m reattaching your feet backwards next time I have to fix your legs.” You say, and he  _ beams,  _ the bastard. 

“You’re looking better,” he says anyway, “And you certainly sound more like yourself,” he adds with a grin.

Well, you can’t exactly argue with him. 

“I think - we should try to set you down now,” Ultra Magnus’s voice is strained. 

“Yes,” you say, relief flooding through you, almost startling in its intensity, “Alright,”

“Swerve, you will -”

“Getting out of the way stat, Mags.” Swerve says, and you can feel hands let go of your feet. 

You should be afraid that you’ll fall right back through the floor as Magnus lets you go and Roller lowers the three of you down, but you feel strangely buoyant. 

The tips of Rodimus’s feet hit the plating first, and then your feet echo their  _ clang.  _ You can hear Magnus sigh with relief, and you can feel tension drop out of the three frames still held close to you - because Roller still hasn’t let go of you. 

“Don’t  _ scare  _ me like that, Ratch, sheesh,” Roller says, close behind you. 

“What,” you huff, even as you lean back against him, feeling that you’re still solid, “You’re the only one allowed to pull a disappearing act?”

Roller laughs. “I think one’s enough for the two of us, dontcha think?” You snort, and Roller looks over you at Drift. He pats Drift on the shoulder as he loosens his grip on the three of you. 

You look at Drift. “Hey,”

“Hey,”

“Good looking out, kid.”

Drift nods, the relieved smile on his face quirking up into a smirk. He opens his mouth -

“Feet. Backwards.” 

Drift grins at you, and you can’t quite keep a  _ tiny  _ returning smile off of your face. 

You’re a damn  _ sap. _

Rodimus is slumped across your shoulder and Drift’s like he’s just had all his cables cut. He looks up, head falling all the way back on the back of his collar. “Guess you’re stuck with us, huh?” He says, hand tightening its grip on your back.

You look around, and there are bright and relieved optics looking at you from all around, and Swerve knocking up against your hip, and Velocity calling for you. 

Yeah, you’re a sap. Maybe that’s good enough.

“Yeah. Guess I am.”


End file.
